The present invention relates to apparatuses and methods for enabling improved reading in an electronic display.
Despite heavy technological (digital) advances, the illustration of textual information has not fundamentally changed. Texts are typically displayed in lines such that the reader's eye moves sequentially from word to word. With each eye movement (“saccade”) time is spent refixating the eye on the new word in order to recognize and process its meaning. The fixation takes about 240 milliseconds (“ms”) per word on average. Only 20% of the time for fixation is used for processing the content. It is also very common that a saccade does not reach the correct fixation point, so additional eye movement is required for reading a word.
One display technique for reducing saccades is Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, hereinafter referred to as “RSVP.” RSVP was first introduced in the 1970s as a technique for presenting text one word at a time in a display. Many references since then have provided information on the use of RSVP in a variety of applications. Commercially available products based on RSVP include “Zap Reader” (www.zapreader.com/reader) and “Spreeder” (www.spreeder.com). Some prior methods exist for improving the effectiveness of an RSVP by varying the display time of a word in the display based on word length and word type (see, U.S. Pat. No. 6,130,968 to McIan et al. (“McIan”)) and based on word frequency (see WO/37256 by Goldstein et al. (“Goldstein 2002”)). While these techniques are beneficial in improving comprehension of the displayed text, none of these teach how to minimize saccade movement during the presentation of a word or words in the RSVP display.